Tanner Health System engaged my company to provide strategic user experience oversight for their website redesign. They had already engaged a third party development service which was providing a modular, templated CMS. So they needed us to create the information architecture and build out the layout based on the available modules.

To complete a successful project, I facilitated several in-person workshops and worked closely with the different stakeholders to provide strategic UX recommendations.

Problems Solved

1. Streamlined the hard-to-navigate information architecture 

2. Consolidated the previous website’s content with a clear content strategy, making it easier for the user to find what they are looking for

3. Defined the unknown website personas and user needs through workshops

4. Turned available modules into a user-centered experience

Process

In-person workshops

I travelled on numerous occasions to meet with Tanner’s stakeholders, including their creative & marketing strategy teams. I led several interactive workshops to keep the teams on the same path as we kept the project moving. And since Tanner was not familiar with user experience best practices, I used these workshops to get their team thinking about the users perspective and reinforce it as a priority for the new website.

The on-site workshops included:

1. Attribute mapping

   To understand the features and benefits Tanner Health offers, we kicked off the meeting with attribute mapping. During this workshop, I had the client call out items which differentiate them against competitors, for both their website and overall health system. Not only did this help us get a good understanding of what the client should communicate on their website, but it also helped us get a start on the information architecture and the content strategy before speaking to users.

2. Persona 

   Tanner Health had never gone through the process of creating personas before. So to get a solid baseline on who their users are, I decided to hold a persona workshop with the client. During the workshop I spoke with the internal stakeholders and the marketing team to discuss and rank all types of users coming to their website. This gave me an idea of who they are messaging to from the client perspective, which served as a good base before speaking to users.
   

3. In-person wireframes

   I’ve found clients always want to jump to something tangible to show their progress and results. This client also wanted to be an active part of the website process, so we held an in-person wireframing session. In the end, the wireframes were only used to understand the direction the client would like to see the site go. This layout ended up changing based on the user feedback we obtained during the focus groups. But this session was very productive in aligning with the client and involving them in the process.
   

Stakeholder & user interviews, focus groups, and user surveys

Once the in-person workshops were complete, I went on to speak with real users of the website and tried to uncover their needs and wants. I did this in a couple of different ways. First, I did stakeholder and user interviews over the phone. This was the lowest barrier of entry when trying to speak to users. I was able to ask some probing questions, such as “Think about the last time you used a medial focused website. What did you go there for?” This started to give me background on user motivations and website use cases.

Following the phone interviews, I used focus groups to gather additional information. Going back on site at the client’s office, I created a list of people to participate in the two separate focus groups - one for the Tanner department heads and one for community members most likely to use the website.

For the first focus group, with community members I categorized as primary user of the website, we spoke about how they view Tanner, why they would go to the website and how they flow through its content. I ended up finding that the community view of Tanner was very positive, but when it came to the website, they often had a hard time finding the information they needed. Information such as phone numbers, scheduling an appointment and department information, was buried deep within the website and needed to be surfaced higher.

The second group, which included heads of the departments within Tanner, helped us understand how the departments are arranged and what their needs are for the website. We found their department information was a high priority for them. I asked them questions that they often hear from patients and how, in their minds, the website would best remedy answers to those questions. The outcome of this meeting gave me a better understanding of how the health system was arranged and ideas of further questions I could ask users.

Personas

All of the findings and research outlined above helped me craft the following user personas for the website:

1. Patient

2. Clinician

3. Prospective Employee

The patient was determined to be the primary persona, and the clinician and prospective employee are secondary.

Sitemap

The sitemap was one of the most complicated parts of this project. The arrangement of pages and types of content on their previous website was unorganized in all sections. They had over 400 pages of content, with no clear logic to their arrangement. 

To get clarity from the users, I conducted a tree testing exercise to see what path users would go down to find a specific piece of information. I then proceeded with a card sorting exercise with a different group of participants. I then finally started to map out a sitemap of a new arrangement of pages using findings from the tree test, card sorting exercise and all previous engagements with users.

While the site still contained around 200 pages, it ended up being more streamlined and inline with it’s user’s needs.

Information architecture

With the sitemap complete, we were ready to shift our focus to the elements within the pages. I worked with a content strategist to outline what information should be on the pages based on my conversations with users. 

Those previous engagements told me that there were some very important items to the user, such as phone numbers, parking and amenities, which were missing on the previous site. I also found they wanted more community-focused content on the site, since this was more of a local, community health system. 

Once we went through this exercise of determining content needed for the pages, I was able to review all of the modules from the third party website developer and recommend how the pages should be laid out. With over 200 modules available, I narrowed the number down to the 20 that would best fit the type of site we are creating. Using those 20, I was able to create a solid system for the site to create a seamless experience by making sure alike elements were treated and designed out the same.

Results

Once the website launched I tracked the website using Google Analytics and Hotjar to see how users were interacting with the website and based off that data, made iterative changes over time.